US AND THEM

 

I remember how at a very young age I was reading a child’s adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, and replaying the Graeco-Trojan War with toy soldiers on the floor of my room. One of the things which struck me the most then was the fact that I was unable to identify one side as “us” and the other as “them.” I liked Achilles, but disliked Odysseus; I liked Hector, but disliked Paris… Ironically, switching from the Iliad to the Odyssey, the person of Odysseus became much more to my liking. How could this be possible? My mother explained it to me, by saying that there can be good people fighting against each other in a war, using Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard as an example. (She was virtually repeating to me word-for-word what Stalin had previously told my father Artem about Bulgakov’s great work.) But here is my friend Nietzsche talking about the Iliad along the same lines, and answering my question in his own inimitable manner.

The following Nietzschean passage, constituting Menschliches 45, is of immense psychological value both in application to particular individuals, and to society as a whole. It is well deserving to be quoted in full:

“Dual prehistory of good and evil. The concept of good and evil has a dual prehistory. First, in the soul of the ruling clans and castes. The man who has the power to requite goodness with goodness, and evil with evil, and really does practice requital by being grateful and vengeful, is called “good.” The person who is unpowerful, and cannot requite, is taken for bad. As a good man, one belongs to the “good,” a community that has a communal feeling, because all the individuals are entwined by their feeling for requital. A bad man belongs to the “bad,” to a mass of abject, powerless men who have no communal feeling. The good men are a caste; the bad men are a multitude, like particles of dust. Good and bad are for a time the same as noble and low, master and slave. Conversely, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer, both the Trojan and the Greek are good. Not he who does harm to us, but he who is contemptible is considered bad. In the community of the good, goodness is hereditary; it is impossible for a bad man to grow out of such good soil. Should one of the good men nevertheless do something unworthy of good men, one resorts to excuses; one blames God, for example, saying that he struck the good man with blindness and madness.

“Then, in the souls of the oppressed, the powerless. Here, all other human beings are considered bad, cruel, inconsiderate, exploitative, crafty, whether they be noble or base. Evil is their epithet for man, indeed, for every possible living being, even, for example, for a god. Human, Divine mean the same as devilish, evil. The signs of graciousness, helpfulness, pity are anxiously considered as malice, as preludes to a disastrous conclusion, soporifics, and craft, in short, as refined malice. With such a state of mind in the individual, a community can hardly come about at all, or at most in the crudest form. Wherever this conception of good and evil predominates, the ruination of individuals, their tribes and races, is near.

“Our current morality has grown on the soil of the ruling tribes and castes.”

Aside from the multitude of delightful nuances, which this passage contains, we may particularly note that the ability to requite goodness with goodness and evil with evil, according to the cultural traditions of such tribes, is the foundation of social justice, and consequently, only in such societies where this concept clearly predominates is social justice possible. It is therefore perfectly correct to point out as Nietzsche does that our current morality [being justice-centered] has grown on the soil of the ruling tribes and castes, whereas the morality of the oppressed recognizes no justice, and therefore, in all historical cases when the oppressed had actually taken power, it had always been transitional, and never institutional. In the best familiar to me case of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it was the morality of the Russian Intelligentsia, which triumphed with Stalinism, the morality of the well-educated ruling elite. One may be horrified by the cruel practices of Stalinism, but one cannot deny it a consistent and essentially moral view, and likewise practice of justice.